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La Libertadora, Op 236a

Introduction

Milhaud’s extensive score for Supervielle’s play Bolivar included three Chansons de Négresse, which were published separately. (And, as we noted, the middle movement of Scaramouche also came from the overture to this incidental music.) Throughout his life, Milhaud was to compose several large-scale operas, and, towards the end of 1942, living in exile in the United States with his wife and son, he turned to the Supervielle play, whose subject is liberation and freedom, for operatic treatment. It was Milhaud’s wife Madeleine who fashioned the libretto, largely from the play with the author’s permission. (Supervielle was then living in Montevideo.) Composing the opera occupied Milhaud wholly during the first half of 1943, and although he wrote two theatre works on the same subject, the opera does not utilize any material from the earlier incidental music.

The opera Bolivar, Op 236, the largest and one of the more impressive of the sixty-four works Milhaud composed during his American wartime exile (to which he appended the additional ‘Opus Americanum’ numbering), was not commissioned; it was first produced in 1950 at the Paris Opera. Simón Bolívar himself was known as ‘El Libertador’ (‘The Liberator’), and some weeks after completing the score of Bolivar, Milhaud fashioned a suite for two pianos from the opera, giving it the title La Libertadora. One of the striking aspects of Bolivar, a magnificent opera, is Milhaud’s complete absorption of South American folk music within his individual style, producing an effect at times not unlike that of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess—notably in Mañuela’s aria. We can sense this genuine aesthetic in La Libertadora, in which the five dances of the Suite are based upon South American folk tunes—sent to Milhaud by Supervielle himself—that are so wholly like Milhaud as to be virtually indistinguishable from the composer’s original thematic ideas.

Recordings

'If you like two-piano music you'll love this disc. There is simply so much to enjoy. Piano discs as uninhibited and infectious as this are few and fa ...'A hugely entertaining new disc from Hyperion and a superb introduction to the work of a currently rather underrated composer' (BBC Record Review)» More